Polish-Mongolian Paleontological Expedition to the Gobi Desert

[excerpt from Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska's article “50 Years of the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences.”
Ewolucjia 1 (2003): 22-31]

In 1961, Professor Roman Kozlowski notified me that an Academy of Sciences had been established in Mongolia, and that the Polish Academy of Sciences was to sign an agreement with it on scientific cooperation. He suggested that this could be an opportunity to organize paleontological expeditions to Mongolia. Since the late 1940s, when paleontologists from the Paleontological Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow conducted excavations there, we had dreamed in Warsaw of being able to go to the Gobi Desert.

The organization of expeditions to the Gobi Desert was preceded by negotiations in Mongolia (from left, H. Jablonski, R. Kozlowski)

I had several months of time to prepare a project for joint expeditions. When a delegation of the Presidium of the Polish Academy of Sciences went to Mongolia in 1962 to sign an agreement on scientific cooperation, Professor Kozlowski, a member of the delegation, took with him a project I had prepared for three-year Polish-Mongolian Paleontological Expeditions. The project was well received by the presidencies of both academies, and upon the delegation's return to the country, the authorities entrusted me with the task of organizing the expeditions and assuming their scientific leadership.

Gobi Desert expedition in 1965, camp at Altan Uul

The brief first expedition in 1963 was a reconnaissance expedition. The next two expeditions in 1964 and 1965 conducted large-scale excavations in areas of the Gobi desert and western Mongolia. The 1965 expedition was followed by a year of hiatus, and in 1967, 1968 and 1969 we organized three “mini expeditions” that did not excavate, but collected fossils (mainly mammals and lizards) on the surface, in the sediments of the Cretaceous Jadochta Formation at Bayan Dzak (current transcription of Bayan Zag). In 1970 and 1971, the Institute sent further expeditions to conduct large-scale excavations.

Expedition camp, Chulsan 1971

From the Polish side, 30 people took part in the expeditions, including 13 people from the Department: Andrzej Baliński, Magdalena Borsuk-Białynicka, Józef Kaźmierczak, Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska, Maciej Kuczyński, Cyprian Kulicki, Aleksander Nowiński, Halszka Osmólska, Wojciech Siciński, Wojciech Skarżyński, Andrzej Sulimski, Hubert Szaniawski and Adam Urbanek. Among employees from other institutions who took part in the expeditions and made a special contribution, Kazimierz Kowalski (from the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow) should be mentioned first and foremost. He was the leader of the 1964 expedition (the other expeditions worked under my direction) and worked on some of the Tertiary mammals collected by the expeditions. Geologists Ryszard Gradziński, Jerzy Lefeld of the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Tomasz Jerzykiewicz of the University of Wroclaw worked out the stratigraphy and sedimentology of the strata studied. Ryszard Gradziński, who, in addition to sedimentological studies, maintained detailed documentation of our work, publishing topographical sketches and stratigraphic profiles of the explored exposures, which are also still used by expeditions from other countries working in these areas, has made a particularly large contribution. The invaluable Teresa Maryańska of the Museum of the Earth of the Polish Academy of Sciences took part in all four major expeditions (in 1971 as deputy expedition leader), and subsequently developed the dinosaur collection. The organization of the expeditions from the technical side was handled by Maciej Kuczyński.

Participants in the 1965 paleontological expedition to the Gobi Desert

The Polish-Mongolian Paleontological Expedition to Mongolia (1963-1971) was recognized by world opinion as one of the largest paleontological expeditions in the world. We collected an impressive collection of skeletons of dinosaurs and other reptiles (turtles, crocodiles, lizards and snakes), dinosaur and bird eggs, rare specimens of birds from the Cretaceous period, and a very valuable collection of about 180 specimens (skulls, often preserved with extracranial skeletons) of mammals from the Cretaceous period, plant remains, freshwater Cretaceous invertebrates, and rich materials of Tertiary mammals. The collection of mammals from the second half of the Cretaceous period collected by the expeditions, at the time the expedition ended, constituted the largest collection of mammal skulls from the Mesozoic era assembled in any  paleontological museum in the world. According to an agreement with the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, most of the collected dinosaur skeletons were returned to Mongolia after processing (and making casts in Poland). Only a small part of the original dinosaur skeletons remained in Poland, as well as collections of lizards, crocodiles, turtles, birds, mammals and invertebrates.

The basic studies of expedition materials were published under my editorship in ten volumes of Palaeontologia Polonica, in a series entitled Results of the Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expeditions, published in 1969-1984, with a total of 64 articles. In parallel, reports on the results of the expeditions, followed by papers of a general nature, often co-authored with foreign scholars, were published in many other international journals (including Nature).

The Polish-Mongolian expeditions opened up new research topics for Polish paleontologists, related to groups previously outside the scope of their original research activities. The description of dinosaurs was then taken up by many of the Institute's employees, including those who later turned to other systematic groups. Magdalena Borsuk-Białynicka and Aleksander Nowinski described Mongolian sauropods. Ewa Roniewicz participated in the elaboration of the theropods Gallimimus and Deinocheirus together with Halszka Osmólska, who remained faithful to the dinosaurs. H. Osmólska soon became one of the world's leading specialists on this group of animals. She described (often in cooperation with T. Maryanska of the Museum of the Earth of the Polish Academy of Sciences) more than a dozen new species of these animals, classified in new genera, families and orders, focusing primarily on the study of theropods and avian dinosaurs. These included the first remains of thick-headed dinosaurs discovered outside North America and primitive horned dinosaurs preserved in various growth stages. H. Osmólska and T. Maryanska also worked on the taxonomy, functional analysis and affinities of duck-billed dinosaurs. Both authors, together with M. Wolsan, also put forward the hypothesis that oviraptors are secondarily flightless praptacians. Karol Sabath (in co-authorship with Norwegian paleontologist J. H. Hurum) prepared a study of the cranial anatomy of the large carnivorous dinosaur Tarbosaurus, proving its generic difference from the North American Tyrannosaurus. The contribution of Polish researchers to the study of dinosaurs was reflected in intensive international cooperation - from numerous visits by researchers using the Institute's collections for comparative purposes, to the participation of Polish specialists in the most important synthetic studies on this group. Among others, Halszka Osmólska is one of the editors and authors of the fundamental compendium The Dinosauria, published in 1990 by California University Press (a new edition is nearing completion).

The close relationship between dinosaurs and birds was also reflected in the conclusions of a study of dinosaur and bird eggs collected in Mongolia, which Karol Sabath examined in co-authorship with Russian paleontologist K. Mikhailov. And Andrzej Elzhanowski (who participated in the 1971 expedition to Mongolia as a student), meanwhile, described the unique embryos of Cretaceous birds preserved in the eggs. Crocodiles collected by the Polish-Mongolian expedition were compiled by Halszka Osmólska, while lizards were studied by Andrzej Sulimski and Magdalena Borsuk-Bialynicka, who also worked on kineticism and skull evolution.

In the collection of Late Cretaceous mammals collected during the expeditions (studied by me) are primarily representatives of the extinct lateral branch of mammals - multituberculates (Multituberculata), the structure of which has been incompletely understood so far. Perfectly preserved skulls of multituberculates and extracranial skeletons allowed me to reconstruct their structure (e.g., I found the occurrence of bag bones previously unknown in this group), appearance and lifestyle, as well as to establish affinities with other groups of Mesozoic mammals. All of these polychaete mammals belong to a distinct developmental lineage, only the geologically latest of them can be related to the forms of the North American. In addition, in the formations of the Late Cretaceous of Mongolia there are representatives of placental mammals and so-called deltateroids, related to the torpid mammals. As in the case of dinosaurs, the study of the Cretaceous mammals of Mongolia allowed Polish researchers to be included in the synthetic study of Mesozoic mammals on a global scale. In 1979, a compendium was published: Mesozoic Mammals: The First Two-thirds of Mammalian History, published by California University Press, of which I was co-editor and co-author. In 2001, I demonstrated in a paper published in Nature (co-authored with American colleagues Zhe-Xi Luo and Richard L. Cifelli) that the tribosphenic teeth of Mesozoic mammals from the southern and northern hemispheres formed independently of each other. The same team of authors (arranged by Z. Kielan-Jaworowska, R. L. Cifelli and Z.-X. Luo) prepared another compendium covering the knowledge of all Mesozoic mammals of the world, entitled Mammals of the Age of Dinosaurs: Origins, Evolution, and Structure published in 2004 by Columbia University Press.

In addition to vertebrates from the Late Cretaceous sediments of Mongolia, we collected a collection of freshwater mussels studied by Janina Szczechura and Janusz Błaszyk, as well as hatchlings of brachiopods developed by Jadwiga Karczewska, in cooperation with Maria Ziembinska-Tworzydło of Warsaw University (a participant in the 1971 expedition to Mongolia).